Outdoor PR Stunts

A PR stunt (or publicity stunt) is an event staged to get public attention or for marketing purposes. The reason why most of them are successful is because it's visual. This is crucial as the average time a person spends looking at an outdoor advertising campaign is 1.7 seconds. As it is not static, there is a lot of room to engage with passers-by and get their attention. PR stunts can go terribly wrong and can sometimes not create the publicity intended. Below are examples of exceptional PR stunts that worked so well. Mastercard and JCDecaux organised a truly remarkable PR stunt in which a gentleman sat on a chair, attached to a large billboard and arranged to meet his girlfriend at this location. She had no idea what was happening and crowds of people had began spectating. Upon his girlfriend's arrival, he asked here whether or not she would be his Valentine.   The video below shows how everything was set up and how the proposal was arranged.   Cadbury used JCDecaux Innovate to promote Wispa Gold in a live PR stunt by inviting the public to take part in an online competition to design a poster which would be painted live on a London billboard site by Rolf Harris. The winning entry was a marriage proposal which Rolf Harris painted in front of members of the public which included the unknowing bride to be.   JCDecaux Innovate has brought the silver screen or 'Cinema Peroni' to the UK’s street which is a real cinema open to the public at JCDecaux’s Old Street site. ‘Cinema Peroni’ seats 20 people in cinema-style Peroni-branded blue seats with a specially commissioned film projected onto a Première 400 billboard. Spencer Berwin, Managing Director – Sales at JCDecaux said, “This spectacular special build cinema by JCDecaux Innovate is a media first for Outdoor – a perfect combination of location, audience and creativity at our Old Street site. Peroni’s cinema will reach youthful, urban audiences heading to Shoreditch and Hoxton and central London, providing brand interaction and creating a buzz about this innovative ‘pop-up’ event – a first on an Outdoor advertising site.”     Lynx is one of the top market leaders in the deodorant industry and was the first company to create a pocket sized deodorant. When teamed up with JCDecaux, they managed to execute a PR stunt very well in every aspect possible. The billboard was created in order to look like the pocket on a pair of jeans in which a special build of the Lynx Bullet was placed inside as well as a model Lauren Budd. Using a pretty female in an advertising campaign targeted at males was vital and something Lynx are very familiar with.  “Guys are always looking for an opportunity to pull - I get chatted up on the train, in shops and even when I’m in a pocket at 8am on Old Street!!” says Lauren.       The UK is not the only place where PR Stunts take place. There have been many memorable events taken across the globe that JCDecaux is very pleased to be a part of. We start with Bladenweek - Hachette Filipacchi Media's live performance in Netherlands. The bus shelter at the Leidseplein in Amsterdam was turned into a live poster for three days. Actors acted the content of the poster "live" in the bus shelter. Three different scenes showed passers-by three of the most common places where people tend to read magazines: at the hair salon, in bed and in the bathroom! The bus shelter was also turned into a kiosk, where copies of the magazines were available for free.         IKEA is another company which is very daring and creative when it comes to advertising, so attaching an upright bed to a building wrap was no problem. The PR stunt was created in order to promote the new range of beds that IKEA now stocked offering a 60 days sleep guarantee. A male and female were placed inside the bed to appear as though they are lying down when in fact they are really standing up. Below is a closer look at the couple in the 'bed'.   Dancing, laughing and singing is what brought a group of women together to create a PR Event for Twisto's. At Baquedano station in Chile a group of women met including actresses to sing and dance to entertain the normal routine of Metro passengers. After three minutes, the actresses and dancers dispersed quickly to maintain the normality of the Metro environment and free samples of the Twistos were distributed to commuters. A video of this can be seen below.